Labour bring back The Red Flag, melodious and neutered

Soprano leads the delegates in rendition of socialist anthem, but annual party conference ends with a traditional whimper

Published on Thu 29 Sep 2011 19.41 EDT

T

he great anticlimax that is the end of the Labour party conference came as a soprano sang The Red Flag. She had a lovely voice. She might have been performing in King's College chapel on Christmas Eve. The accompaniment was provided by the massed ranks of the conference, who had been handed glossy cards with the words printed on them.

In the past, delegates would have no more needed the words provided for them than they would have required a karaoke screen and a bouncing ball with the lyrics of Happy Birthday to You. The hoarse voices, filtered through millions of cigarettes and thousands of pints, would croak out the words as if they meant it, as if the red flag would indeed be flying over the barricades tomorrow, weather permitting.

Under Tony Blair it was briefly banned, but now it's back in a pleasing, melodious, entirely neutered version.

But the whole final morning is a let-down, a punctured airbed of an occasion. Labour is the only party that doesn't close its conference with the leader's speech. This is because, traditionally, it was known as the "parliamentary report", in the days when the party had only a handful of MPs and their leader was a figure of only marginal consequence.

Even Blair, who dragged the party to the right and abolished clause IV, kept his big speech on Tuesday. It meant that after two days all that built-up tension had gone, and he could spend the rest of the time on television, explaining what he really meant.

The only excitement came when a Liverpool councillor, Lynnie Hinnigan, came to the platform and told the delegates that she had been a member of the Lib Dems until Wednesday, but had now joined Labour. She got a standing ovation just for turning up and saying this.

In a Merseyside accent so thick you could have sliced it up and served it in a toasted bap, she said she could no longer "defend the indefensible". She wanted her daughter to go to university, but she couldn't because of tuition fees. "Nick Clegg lied, he lied to me … I have to do what's right, what's right for my children, my stepchildren – and my city!" Of course the conference rose to a mighty, thumping round of applause.

Norma Stephenson, conference chairwoman and Labour's Ena Sharples, said drily: "We do that for every new member, 65,000 in the past year, all that clapping."

Harriet Harman topped things off with a recap of everything that had been said before, all week. There was a significant difference, though. The apologies are over. "The two Eds have acknowledged what we all know – that not everything we did in government turned out right.

"We have taken a hard look, and we've learned lessons. But it's time to move on, because we have hard work to do."

So it's official. No more grovelling. The slate is wiped clean and recent history has been abolished. As Paul Flynn MP once remarked: "In New Labour, the future is certain. It's the past that is always changing."